"The Blues I'm Playing"

In Langston Hughes' "The Blues I'm Playing", the protagonist lives her life at odds with her patron. The elderly white woman wants to enforce a separation of the girl from her boyfriend, the jazz community, and black culture in general in order to transplant her into the world of 'art.' The piece represents a turmoil that was occurring in the artistic community of the time- does an artist need to create in a world devoid of all else? Should rough or passionate emotions be considered part of art and key to its success, or a contaminant? During the Harlem renaissance, the rise of jazz as an American art form was at odds with classical music. The soul of jazz was in improvisation, embellishment, and change. Classical music had passion, but it was imbued in the composers notes that the musician then played to share emotion. The elderly patron looked upon classical music as art, and refused to let it share its pedestal. Her protégé was representative of the open minded youth; art was created from her and she wanted to make people feel emotions beyond the transcendental feelings her patron longed for from classical music. There is also an underlying conflict of sexuality in the piece. The piano player is happy she is not pregnant out of wedlock with her boyfriends child, and insists on marrying him later in the story. Oceola argues that she can be married, have children, and still enjoy art. The childless patron has repressed her sexuality. She channels it through her patronage of young people- some beautiful and talented, others who talent was being beautiful. There is a hint at sexual tension where Mrs. Ellsworth is lying in bed with the girl she sponsors, and the author describes her own rationalization of these feelings "... aware all the time of the electric strength of that brown-black body beside he ... then Mrs. Ellsworth would feel very motherly toward this dark girl whom she had taken under her wing on the wonderful road of art, to nurture and love until she became a great interpreter of the piano." Mrs. Ellsworth channels her sexuality under the guise of true art and patronage of those seeking it- perhaps her reasons for chastising the emotional and raw art that was the new jazz and blues stemmed from her uneasy realization that she herself had mixed sexuality with art.